Famous Modern Ghost Stories eBook

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand
men in arms with all their artillery swelled like
a flood against the little English company, there
was one point above all other points in our battle
line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely
of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the
permission of the Censorship and of the military expert,
this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient,
and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the
English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied
left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and
shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand
or so of men who held it. The men joked at the
shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets
about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall
songs. But the shells came on and burst, and
tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother
from brother, and as the heat of the day increased
so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There
was no help, it seemed. The English artillery
was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it
was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people
say to one another, “It is at its worst; it
can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it
was in these British trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than
the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled
as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade
fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them.
And at this very moment they saw from their trenches
that a tremendous host was moving against their lines.
Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far
as they could see the German infantry was pressing
on against them, column upon column, a gray world of
men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some
of them. One man improvised a new version of
the battle-song, “Good-by, good-by to Tipperary,”
ending with “And we shan’t get there.”
And they all went on firing steadily. The officer
pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class
fancy shooting might never occur again; the Tipperary
humorist asked, “What price Sidney Street?”
And the few machine guns did their best. But
everybody knew it was of no use. The dead gray
bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others
came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred,
and advanced from beyond and beyond.

“World without end. Amen,” said one
of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he
took aim and fired. And then he remembered—­he
says he cannot think why or wherefore—­a
queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had
once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made
of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak.
On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed